


Khalil

by moconyx



Series: For Creative Writing [1]
Category: Original Work, Vampire: The Masquerade
Genre: Black Male Character, Character Turned Into Vampire, Gen, Hate Crimes, Murder, Period-Typical Racism, Racism, Revenge, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-18 11:38:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19333780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moconyx/pseuds/moconyx
Summary: The death of Clint and the birth of Khalil





	Khalil

**Author's Note:**

> I wanna preface this with saying I'm black, lol I don't think I should have to say this but it was fun to get myself in this head space even though I don't really think like that. This required me to get more into my parents and grandparents generation and what they thought of white people. So don't take any offense to this.
> 
> Why is this the second story I've written that has a character being beaten on the premise of race? anyway...

Khalil

Khalil’s face was indifferent as he drug the bodies into a heap in the small wooden shack in the middle of the woods. They made this too easy for him, he thought as he dropped the last one in the center, a strategically placed .44 caliber mag round through the eye and rendered the man lifeless.  
  
He picked up the can of kerosene and poured it over their lifeless forms but before he struck a match he wandered over to their poker table. The client said nothing about not taking any spoil and there was at least four hundred on the table, which he did pocket before exiting the small cabin. Khalil had to move fast before they woke up, they weren't exactly dead, or at least, not yet.  
  
When he dropped the match, the flame drove him back and nearly burned his skin, might have actually singed some hairs. He could hear the highest pitch shrills as he let the shack no doubt that last bit of life before the fire took them.  
  
All he had to do at this point was call it in and he took a black prepaid phone out of his pocket.  
  
"911, what is your emergency?" He heard a female voice ask on the other end.  
  
"Yeah, ya'll might want to come out here near Trap Pond State Park. I think I see some smoke out there... It looks to be a few miles out." He said trying to sound concerned. "It's probably some kind of campfire but I wouldn't know." He hung up the phone after a polite goodbye and chucked the phone into the fire as he got into his car and rode away. He was a nice distance away when the troopers came out. Why this had to be a spectacle? He wasn't sure of that.

Khalil entered his apartment complex some half an hour later. The walls were stone; concrete and the windows were boarded up with wooden planks ensuring no sunlight could filter through this dark, dank place. There was a bathroom (if that's what you could call it) though the toilet had not been used in many years. The only thing functioning and clean about it was the sink and the shower built into the floor. The rest of the room was completely unfurnished save for a bed and an old worn dresser for his clothes.  
  
Out of his pocket he pulled out a more complex phone, no doubt one he used for his own personal use and checked the time. He managed to make it back indoors before sunrise this time. He removed his two Mateba 6 Unica auto-revolvers and set them on top of the dresser along with his twin Benelli B76s that he used for reliability. The four of them gleaming, even in the dim lighting of the room, he could see himself in the polished chrome. The next thing to come off was his holsters, off his waist and off his shoulders and hung them on the knob of the door of his “apartment” and he stretched out on the bed.

\---

Khalil Redford didn’t always go by that name. Long ago he went by Clint Johnson, born in Atlanta Georgia in 1910. Clint was brought up knowing the color of skin and being conscious of it; he was thirteen when the Rosewood Massacre happened. He remembered his Mama telling him about it and it sent a chill up his spine, scared him the same way the Boogie-Man would scare children now-a-days. Some nights he was scared to go to sleep; thinking that if he’d close his eyes for even a second there that when he’d open them the small two bedroom house he shared with his family would be ablaze. The mob would come and lynch his Mama and Daddy like she told him white folks did to those people down in Florida; that they’d lynch him too along with his sisters and brothers.

It took him a few years to even shake that fear out of him but that was always present in the back of his mind; it was a paranoia that shaped him into the man he became after that. As a grown man he made sure to listen to all the lessons is mama taught him; don’t talk back to the white men and kill them with kindness, don’t talk to the white women and don’t even look at them. Listening to her kept him alive for about damn near thirty years.

“Clint, you mind taking out that trash in the kitchen?” Mr. Pawlowski said coming out from his office and watching him washing dishes. Clint had worked for Pawlowski for a couple years and was one of the few whites he trusted; the man treated him like a person but he still didn’t push it with the man. He was a short pudgy man, his hair was starting to thin and whatever hair he had left he had slicked back and looked like mud sliding off his scalp. It was hard to fear a man that was barely 5 foot and he towered over at nearly 6 feet. Clint wiped his hands on a towel hanging from his back pocket and cast man a stony gaze. “Don’t give me that look. We both know it’s hotter than hell in here and the fresh air can do you some good.”

Normally taking out the trash wasn’t a problem, but tonight was busy and the trash was beginning to pile up.

“Bag it up, toss it and take a smoke break or something.” He wobbled over, another funny thing he noticed about Pawl; his legs were starting to buckle under his weight. The older man set a cigar in his hand, and to Clint it felt like some sort of peace offering or a sign of unspoken respect. “Get out of here, I’ll get someone to finish the dishes while you’re at it.”

He put the cigar in his apron pocket and started bagging the trash. Stepping out into the warm night air was something he was used to, but tonight had a nice cool breeze wafting through the alley. He dumped bags into the dumpster and it didn’t take him hardly any time with the old heave-ho technique he finished in under five minutes.

Clint was just pulling the fine cigar out of his pocket before glancing down the narrow bricked path. At the very end of it, a figure sat huddled and slumping against the wall. Something told him that approaching them was a bad idea but things looked bleak for the shadowy figure. It took almost ten strides and his eyes adjusted to the darkness when he stepped out of the glow from the back entrance of the restaurant. On the ground was a man, darker than him sitting, his eyes swollen shut and bleeding all over; bleeding from his head, bleeding from his lips, bleeding from his nose. Skin that he supposed looked like oil now seemed dirty and pigmented with blood and smeared across his skin. It brought him back to the books he’d seen, tribal people with war paint marking their bodies, spread across their faces and they wore it with pride. There was no pride in the way he had been battered.

He contemplated letting the man be, leaving him there and just go back to work but something told him to leave but his moral rationale wouldn’t allow it. In a sense this man was his brother, and black folk looked out for one another when they could. He put a hand on the man’s slumping shoulder after a moment and the heaving seemed to stop. He leaned in even closer to hear a breath or feel it on the side of his face. None. Then he tried for a pulse on his neck. None.

Aw hell, was the only thought. The man had died, he was still warm too. He raised up and looked around for a moment, looking for attackers; fear shining in his eyes like a buck during hunting season and just heard a rustle in the underbrush. Sure enough he heard voices coming from the other end of the alley, their voices ricocheting off the brick, male voices calling a male’s name… could have been the dead man’s name for all he knew. They stepped into the light and he felt his heart drop into his stomach, there had to be a half a dozen white men.

He didn’t really say much of anything but he backed away from the man. He wanted to be clear that he had no ties with the man lying dead.

“You thinking about doing something about this?” One of the men slurred, it was obvious that he was drunk and looking for an excuse to fight.

“I ain’t thinking of doing anything.” He shook his head and tried to not look so nervous; he didn’t want them to sense his fear. “I don’t know him.” He could see the looks shared between the men, almost as if they were trying consider the risk of him trying to go to the authorities. The leader motioned for them to grab him before he had a chance to escape.

The men seized his arms, pulling his thin limbs taunt and leaving him trying to twist out of their hold but without budge. Another man moved forward and hit him hard across his face then in the gut. Being struck across the face didn’t hurt nearly as much as the being punched in the stomach, he seemed to crumble immediately to the ground as the other men circled him like vultures and all began to kick and punch him into the ground.

The briefest of moments he could look up and blurrily see a flurry of bloody fists and polished shoes coming down on him and after a while he didn’t feel the individual hits, they meshed together and seemed like one unified fist. Something happened that made them stop, maybe it was him losing consciousness. They left him there to bleed out on warm bricks.

He did eventually wake up and for a moment he thought he had died; he found himself looking into the face of strange man. Clint blinked a few times and studied stone walls around him and it took him a moment to realize where he was. There were tombs around him, still standing urns; some broken or knocked over. He was lying in a mausoleum.

“What the hell is this?” He wanted to get up but he felt weak.

“Don’t,” The stranger said. “You have been sleeping for a while, you don’t have the strength to give me a hard time.” He could see the man’s lips curl into a small smirk, a long sharp canine was exposed. He before Clint had a chance to react to what he saw, the strange white man raised a hand to stop him. “You are awfully energetic, maybe saving you was worth it.”

Usually he felt ill at ease around non-Negroes… but something deep within told him that this man was safe; he meant him no harm. Clint had good instincts and good common sense as a boy and when he followed his gut it never lead him astray.

Maybe if he would have followed his gut in that back alley he wouldn’t be sitting here dead.

He wasn’t book smart, but he’d heard of the book Dracula and he’d even seen Noseferatu when he was younger… but he had a hard time trying to grasp being a vampire at first. The man, who he started to call Al, to spare him the headache of pronunciation, taught him everything he knew. His sire processed more patience and empathy than his own birth father did. Al told him stories of days of old, of a country he wasn’t taught about in his books, sometimes slipping into a language that he never even heard or thought existed. Al gave him what none of the old out of date books at the school house could give him, knowledge.

Clint compared it to being a child again, instead of learning to walk he learned to stalk like a cat, quietly and gracefully. Instead of learning how to tie his shoes, he learned how to kill a man without him making a sound and how to suck out his life; on occasion, how to drink without killing a man and when to stop when their pulse grew faint. The man made him study the world around him, the way people moved through life; he even studied the “others”, vampires included. If the world had a pulse, then he drank from it.

His sire taught him many things but one of his favorite lessons was learning his bloodline’s discipline. There wasn’t just one type of vampire, there were many and they were almost a segregated as whites and colored people were. Some vampires were privileged and beautiful while others were hideous and roamed the sewers like rats. Each clan had something they were known for; the clan that he and Al belonged to were quick to anger and possessed ungodly strengths. This wasn’t the kind of strength where he had the strength of ten men; Al lifted an old rail car from a train. He didn’t even flinch and it was as if it were a stack of papers. Thirty tons, and he could just shift it from hand to hand like it was nothing. There was of course a down side, it used a lot of blood and he’d have to go feed again to replenish himself. Clint practiced that, he was never able to lift that damn rail car.

He learned from Al for only ten years before they split up, and it was on good terms but it wasn’t any less sad. His sire explained that he hadn’t intended to make a progeny but he watched those men beat him to death and he felt sorry for him, that and he showed a lot of promise. Clint just tried to shrug it off and pretend he wasn’t the least bit sad about it; he still felt like there was so much more to learn from someone as wise and old as Alfr.

One of the first things Clint did once he was let go by his sire was track down the men that killed him. Though they contributed to his enlightenment but they hadn’t paid for what they’d done. There was some bitterness in as he watched his brothers and sisters get married and have children while time seemed to stand still for him. The men involved had also lives of their own, became upstanding men of society, and pushed what they had done from their minds as if it were a distant memory. These men became politicians, law enforcement, these men put themselves in positions of power. They made their own mistake in staying in Georgia, made them even easier to find and his didn’t have to travel too far or expose himself to the sun.

He hunted each one down and didn’t give them merciful deaths. When they saw him, either hovering over their beds or standing behind them in a doorway, they seemed to know exactly who he was. They would plead and beg for mercy, they had wives and children at home, and fed him tired excuses: “It wasn’t me.” “Wasn’t my idea.” “Terry made me do it.” None of them owned up to what they had done. There were no witnesses; he made sure of that in the end.

Word traveled fast among the vampires of Atlanta, called him “The Vampire Hit Man” long before he took the title. He was a true monster for how he could kill those people; not out of anger or in a manic blood frenzy but as some act of divine intervention.

He didn’t take up the title of “The Vampire Hit Man” until the Civil Rights movement. The non-violent messages didn’t really matter much to him. Especially with the backlash they got in return; peaceful marches turning into the police soaking down blacks with fire hoses, the police dogs being let loose, and brutality when there was no violence to begin with.

What the humans didn’t know was that the vampires were the very framework of their society. What’s worse was that the vampires orchestrated the whole thing from the very beginning. Princes of city’s called upon him to assassinate leaders of the movement. It wasn’t that the vampires had chosen a side, every once and a while you had to cause an event that kept their existence hidden. The man that he had been was chipped away with every shell.

He once had a man quartered, instead of using horses he used cars and watched him slowly get pulled apart. He’d even once flayed someone’s skin from their hand to get information. Each live he took, man, it felt like a year added to his. He’d killed Clint when he took blood for the first time, when the blood of men nourished him.

Khalil was the name he took and soon became a name that shake the bones of any mobster Al-Capone type. And that’s the man he was now, Clint was already long gone.


End file.
